Paul Graham: “What those who
teach, cannot do” - Fortune

Paul Graham: “What those who
teach, cannot do”

It’s not true that those who can’t do, teach (some of the best
hackers I know are professors), but it is true that there are a lot
of things that those who teach can’t do. Research imposes
constraining caste restrictions. In any academic field there are
topics that are ok to work on and others that aren’t. Unfortunately
the distinction between acceptable and forbidden topics is usually
based on how intellectual the work sounds when described in
research papers, rather than how important it is for getting good
results. The extreme case is probably literature; people studying
literature rarely say anything that would be of the slightest use
to those producing it.

Though the situation is better in the sciences, the overlap
between the kind of work you’re allowed to do and the kind of work
that yields good languages is distressingly small. (Olin Shivers
has grumbled eloquently about this.) For example, types seem to be
an inexhaustible source of research papers, despite the fact that
static typing seems to preclude true macros-- without which, in my
opinion, no language is worth using.